Free Republic

The U.S. economy peaked in late 2019 at $21 trillion. We are now remarkably 98 percent back to where we were before the terrible COVID-19 pandemic slammed these shores 14 months ago. This rebound is one of the outstanding U.S. achievements in history. Since June of last year, the economy has rocketed by 34 percent in quarter 3 of 2020, 4.2 percent in quarter 4 of 2020 and now 6.4 percent in the first three months of 2021. So far in this current quarter, growth is more than 10 percent.Almost no one expected this. The Federal Reserve Board, the Congressional...

Is America in a new Gilded Age? That's the contention of Republican political consultant Bruce Mehlman, and in a series of 35 slides, he makes a strong case. In many ways, problems facing America today resemble those facing what we still call "turn-of-the-century" America, the 1890s to the 1910s. Just as employment shifted from farms to factories a century ago, it has been moving from manufacturing to services recently. Financial crashes are another point of resemblance, coming precisely 100 years apart. The panic of 1907 was resolved when J.P. Morgan locked his fellow financiers in his library and required them...

Call it an economic and political victory for "New Iraq" -- and an indication that we may see more in the future. This past Monday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's cabinet finally agreed to a reformed "oil law." The cabinet will forward the legislative package to the Iraqi parliament for action later this spring. The "oil reform" program in Iraq is long overdue, but the Iraqi government also deserves kudos for the effort. Democracy is often a slow, muddled and tedious operation (look at the U.S. Congress). Until Iraq's democratically elected parliament was seated and the government selected, Iraq lacked "full...

Voting began in Germany's closely fought election today with millions of undecided voters holding the key to a result that will have major implications for economic reform in Europe. Angela Merkel, a Christian Democrat (CDU) chancellor, is expected to emerge as Germany's first woman chancellor, displacing Gerhard Schroeder who has led Germany for the past seven years at the head of a centre-left government of Social Democrats and Greens. A provisional result is expected to be announced in the early hours of Monday morning. The final opinion polls published on Friday gave Merkel's centre-right coalition with the liberal Free Democrats...

N. Korea Reportedly Cuts Int'l Phone Lines1 hour, 49 minutes ago SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea has cut most of its international phone lines since late March over concerns that sensitive information about its society will flow out of the isolated country, South Korea's spy agency reportedly said Tuesday. Spy agency officials told a closed-door session of the National Assembly's Intelligence Committee that international phone connections had been cut at most of the North's trading companies and at government agencies since late March, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. Since April, even people with permits to make international...

There’s an old tale which says that if you take a frog and throw him in a pot of hot, boiling water the frog will jump out. But if you take the frog and put him in a pot of cold water, and gradually turn up the heat, little by little over a long period of time, the frog’s body will adjust to the incremental increases of heat and eventually boil to death. The U.S. economy is like a frog in a pot of boiling water and he can’t jump out to save himself. One of his legs is the...

In New Delhi, Comrades rant and rave against ‘foreign’ consultants, in Kolkata they use them to script success stories Who’s written Bengal’s roadmap for agro and IT sector? McKinsey. Who’s helped restructure PSUs? Price WaterHouse and UK govt. Who’s helping clean Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s mess? ADB SUBRATA NAGCHOUDHURY Posted online: Sunday, September 19, 2004 at 0312 hours IST KOLKATA, SEPTEMBER 18: When the Planning Commission wanted a report card on the implementation of the Tenth Plan policies, it called in experts — and the Left has been protesting ever since. Messrs McKinsey, World Bank and Asian Development Bank, the three...

European Union leaders ended a two-day meeting today in Barcelona with an agreement to increase competition in energy markets and press ahead with economic reforms. The goal is to overtake the United States and make Europe the most dynamic economy in the world by 2010. The summit meeting, which was heavily policed for fear of protests, also approved the creation of Galileo, a European satellite network to rival the United States' Global Positioning System. An estimated quarter million antiglobalization protestors marched goodhumoredly through the city's center during the afternoon, behind a pink banner that declared: "Against the Europe of capital...